In the context of their research and teaching, the directors of the project Scène Européenne initiated a programme of translation of dramatic works generally difficult to obtain, and then only in their original language, so that they were not readily exploitable by students or researchers. These translationss – from English into French, from Spanish into French, and also from French into English – concern significant texts from the English theatre of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the French theatre of the Renaissance and the Baroque period, and the Spanish theatre of the Golden Age. Each translation is accompanied by an introduction and notes. We hope, as well, that that these translations may, in certain cases, inspire performances.

Although published in Protestant Geneva and disparaging the Roman Catholic church on the grounds of both doctrine and practice, this moral allegory privileges instruction over polemic. It employs the traditional morality-play device of a figure representing Mankind, who, however, finds himself torn less between virtue and vice (the usual situation) than between alternative solutions to his inevitably sinful state. A representative of the Old Law (“Rabbi”), who at first prevails, advocates outward conformity and good works; he is opposed by Paul, who preaches the New Law’s (and Luther’s) message of salvation through faith alone.

The Visionaries achieved enormous popularity with Parisian audiences during its author’s (long) lifetime (1595-1676), before tastes changed with the advent of neo-classicisism. The irony is that the comedy itself is concerned with the vanity of literary fashions, as well as with forms of what has come to be known as “self-fashioning” but which the author groups under the heading of self-deluding folly (the primary meaning of the title).

This tragedy, intriguingly poised between the humanist model and the emerging baroque aesthetic, is based on a story narrated by Helen, Queen of Corinth, in the Arcadia of Philip Sidney (bk. I, chap. 11). Indeed, it has a claim to be the first substantial French adaptation of an English literary work – a claim all the more remarkable because, almost certainly, no translation of Sidney’s romance would have been available to the author, who nevertheless displays a detailed knowledge of that text (probably in its first published version of 1590) beyond the episode in question.

The tragedy of Coriolan by Alexandre Hardy presents special interest as an intertext for Shakespeare’s adaptation of essentially the same material (Plutarch’s “Life of Coriolanus”), in Coriolanus (1608), which was probably closely contemporary, though the date of Hardy’s work is less certain.

This dramatic adaptation of the Arcadia of Philip Sidney ­– a work well known in France, thanks largely to two published translations – was commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu and carries a political message: its treatment of the schemes of the wicked Cécropie (Sidney’s Cecropia) to subvert the state of Arcadia and secure the crown for her son, Amphyale, pretty clearly evokes, in an admonitory vein, Marie de’ Medici and Gaston d’Orléans.

Among the author’s limited dramatic productions over his brief literary career, The Queen of Scotland stood out in its own time, as it continues to do. The only one of Montchrestien’s six tragedies not devoted to a biblical or classical subject, in taking up the theme of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1587), the play ventures into the fraught territory of nearly contemporary politico-religious controversy that is otherwise associated with frank works of propaganda.

Introduction, Edition of the French Text and English Translation by Richard Hillman

Publié le 01/12/2014 - Scène européenne, « Traductions introuvables »

Nothing is known of the stage history (on the reasonable presumption that it had one) of the dramatised pastoral fable that Nicolas de Montreux (as always under his anagrammatic pseudonym of “Olénix du Mont Sacré”) appended to the third volume of his popular Bergeries. The latter are pastoral romances mingling prose and verse on the model of the extremely popular Diana of Jorge de Montemayor.